Down to a comparatively late period of Jewish history, as we now know, Jahweh was but one and the highest among a considerable group of Israelitish divinities; the first among his peers, like Zeus among the gods of Hellas, Osiris or Amen among the gods of Egypt, and Woden or Thunor among the gods of the old Teutonic pantheon. As late as the century of Hezekiah, the religion of the great mass of the Israelites and Jews was still a broad though vague polytheism. The gods seem to have been as numerous and as localised as in Egypt: “According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,” says the prophet Jeremiah in the sixth century. It was only by a slow process of syncretism, by the absorption into Jahweh-worship of all other conflicting creeds, that Israel at last attained its full ideal of pure monotheism. That ideal was never finally reached by the people at large till the return from the captivity: it had only even been aimed at by a few ardent and exclusive Jahweh-worshippers in the last dangerous and doubtful years of national independence which immediately preceded the Babylonish exile. In order to understand the inner nature of this curious gradual revolution we must look briefly, first, at the general character {182}of the old Hebrew polytheism; and secondly, at the original cult of the great ethnical god Jahweh himself. In spite of their long sojourn in Egypt, the national religion of the Hebrews, when we first begin dimly to descry its features through the veil of later glosses, is regarded by almost all modern investigators as truly Semitic and local in origin. It is usually described as embracing three principal forms of cult: the worship of the _teraphim_ or family gods; the worship of sacred stones; and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed; some of them adored in the form of animals, and some apparently elemental or solar in their acquired attributes. Although for us these three are one, I shall examine them here in that wonted order.